Victoria and Vancouver Island have a lot of musical talent, and Victoria Buzz wants to highlight some of the best and brightest local artists and bands.
Every Monday, there will be a fresh ‘New Music Monday’ article to help people find and support local artists and bands that are up-and-coming, well established or hidden gems!
For this endeavour, Victoria Buzz has partnered with our good friends at CFUV 101.9 FM, UVic’s campus radio station, to find and select the musicians and bands for this regular column.
This week, Braxton Glass is the New Music Monday highlight!
Braxton Glass is no newcomer to Victoria’s music scene—he has played in several popular projects, including Saltwater Cowboy, Juniper Smile and his most recent project Bong Witch.
However, Glass is always seeking to explore new territory when it comes to music, which is the attitude that inspired his most recent solo work.
In April, Glass released a four-track instrumental EP, Cascades, which was inspired by a solo backpacking trip he did on Ruby Mountain in Washington State.
“The whole album is kind of a reflective meditative piece on a hike I did in the Cascades,” Glass told Victoria Buzz.
“I hiked up and camped on top of this mountain, and so each of the songs covers a part of the day.”
He says this is something that he’s been wanting to do for a while.
“I’ve been wanting to do it for a while and I really like instrumental guitar music,” Glass explained.
“I just feel like it was something fun to put out and, as opposed to working in bands and trying to cater to how people are going to respond to it, I wanted to just put an album out where creativity is kind of the ethos behind it—that’s the kind of music I listen to like 90% of the time so it was cool to just try my hand at it.”
Part of the process that felt liberating was just being able to get weird with it—using different tuning, throwing in key changes and just truly experimenting with sound.
He describes the sound on this EP as cosmic folk, somewhere in between the genres of American primitive and folk baroque.
Glass chose to pick the song “Cloudburst” as the highlight track from the EP.
“The EP as a whole is trying to capture the feeling of elation as you ascend a mountain, trying to capture what it was like to be there, to try to evoke that emotion in a soundtrack kind of way,” said Glass.
“Cloudburst” tells the part of Glass’ journey on Ruby Mountain where he got to the point where the clouds were beneath him. Standing on top of the mountain he would look out to a view of endless stars and only other mountaintops breaching the clouds around him.
To capture his feelings as he hiked the mountain and pass them along to the listener, Glass approached the songs with the soundscapes of the mountain’s environment in mind. He included bird calls, crickets and other natural sounds, catered to the local fauna of the area.
“As you’re going up this mountain, you get through the trees, it’s starting to thin out and you get to these sparser areas and you start to hear lots of crickets and stuff,” he explained.
“It’s kind of like a windy, quiet soundscape—it’s hard to explain but you get to these hot and dry areas and it just has a dry sound to it.”
Glass added that this hike was one of the best experiences of his life, despite having a close call with a bear near the mountain’s peak.
He says that in the song “Daybreak,” he reflected on the earlier part of the journey up the slopes, in “Eventide,” he was inspired by dusk at the top of the mountain and in “Nocturne,” he contemplated the quiet of the night in his seclusion.
Click below to listen to “Cloudburst,” and the entirety of Cascades:
To listen to Cascades online, it can be found on all major streaming platforms: Spotify, Apple Music and Bandcamp.
Glass says that although he hasn’t performed any of these songs yet live, as a solo performance, he plans to once he is able to release two other solo EPs that are currently in the works.
Aside from his solo endeavours, Bong Witch continues to grow in popularity in Victoria’s punk, psych and metal scenes, finding a balance between the three genres.
Bong Witch is currently working on writing and recording a soundtrack for a silent film, and is getting ready to play some shows in the fall.
One big one Glass is excited for is a ‘bands as bands’ set around Halloween which will see them do a full cover set—though he says the band they will be covering is still top secret.
Follow Braxton Glass and Bong Witch on Instagram to stay up-to-date with any shows or releases that are coming down the line.
Related:
- New Music Monday: faun.a collaborates with nature on new soundscape EP
- New Music Monday: Pony Gold releases first single off forthcoming debut album
- New Music Monday: Earth Freaks try to ‘capture a feeling’ on sophomore album
CFUV is a non-profit campus and community radio station that plays a ton of local music of all kinds across Vancouver Island. If you like to support local music they are an amazing resource with a plethora of new local tunes in their arsenal.
“CFUV is the best radio station in town—it’s the only radio station I listen to,” said Glass.
“They do so much work to support local music and I always find tons of good music on there. It’s always so wide and varied that I never know what I’m going to find.”
Tune into CFUV 101.9 FM on air or online!
Let us know what you think of Braxton Glass in the comments below!
